I post it in its entirety because of the pertinent nature of the content as continued hostility between the USA and Russia is in the news and because of its clarification and challenge to various tropes in the media.

I do not know what is true in this matter - whether the allegations in this article are true, as opposed to allegations in the movie and other portrayals. If what is implied in this excerpt are true then it seems to portent a more conflicted future. The following is an extended excerpt from a new book “How America Lost Its Secrets: Edward Snowden, the Man and the Theft,” by Edward Jay Epstein.

"Of all the lies that Edward Snowden
has told since his massive theft of secrets from the National Security
Agency and his journey to Russia via Hong Kong in 2013, none is more
provocative than the claim that he never intended to engage in
espionage, and was only a “whistleblower” seeking to expose the
overreach of NSA’s information gathering. With the clock ticking on Mr.
Snowden’s chance of a pardon, now is a good time to review what we have
learned about his real mission.

Mr. Snowden’s theft of America’s
most closely guarded communication secrets occurred in May 2013,
according to the criminal complaint filed against him by federal
prosecutors the following month. At the time Mr. Snowden was a
29-year-old technologist working as an analyst-in-training for the
consulting firm of Booz Allen Hamilton at the regional base of the
National Security Agency (NSA) in Oahu, Hawaii. On May 20, only some six
weeks after his job there began, he failed to show up for work,
emailing his supervisor that he was at the hospital being tested for
epilepsy.

This excuse was untrue. Mr. Snowden was not even in
Hawaii. He was in Hong Kong. He had flown there with a cache of secret
data that he had stolen from the NSA.

This
was not the only lie Mr. Snowden told. As became clear during my
investigation over the past three years, nearly every element of the
narrative Mr. Snowden has provided, which reached its final iteration in
Oliver Stone’s 2016 movie, “Snowden,” is demonstrably false.

This narrative began soon after Mr. Snowden arrived in Hong Kong, where he arranged to meet with Laura Poitras, a Berlin-based documentary filmmaker, and Glenn Greenwald,
a Brazil-based blogger for the Guardian. Both journalists were longtime
critics of NSA surveillance with whom Mr. Snowden (under the alias
Citizen Four) had been in contact for four months.

To provide
them with scoops discrediting NSA operations, Mr. Snowden culled several
thousand documents out of his huge cache of stolen material, including
two explosive documents he asked them to use in their initial stories.
One was the now-famous secret order from America’s Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Act court requiring Verizon to turn over to the NSA its
billing records for its phone users in the U.S. The other was an NSA
slide presentation detailing its ability to intercept communications of
non-American users of the internet via a joint program with the FBI
code-named Prism.

These documents were published in 2013 on June 5
and 6, followed by a video in which he identified himself as the leaker
and a whistleblower.

At the heart of Mr. Snowden’s narrative was
his claim that while he may have incidentally “touched” other data in
his search of NSA files, he took only documents that exposed the
malfeasance of the NSA and gave all of them to journalists.

Yet
even as Mr. Snowden’s narrative was taking hold in the public realm, a
secret damage assessment done by the NSA and Pentagon told a very
different story. According to a unanimous report
declassified on Dec. 22 by the House Permanent Select Committee on
Intelligence, the investigation showed that Mr. Snowden had “removed”
(not merely touched) 1.5 million documents. That huge number was based
on, among other evidence, electronic logs that recorded the selection,
copying and moving of documents.

The
number of purloined documents is more than what NSA officials were
willing to say in 2013 about the removal of data, possibly because the
House committee had the benefit of the Pentagon’s more-extensive
investigation. But even just taking into account the material that Mr.
Snowden handed over to journalists, the December House report concluded
that he compromised “secrets that protect American troops overseas and
secrets that provide vital defenses against terrorists and
nation-states.” These were, the report said, “merely the tip of the
iceberg.”

The Pentagon’s investigation during 2013 and 2014
employed hundreds of military-intelligence officers, working around the
clock, to review all 1.5 million documents. Most had nothing to do with
domestic surveillance or whistle blowing. They were mainly military
secrets, as Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,
testified before the House Armed Services Committee on March 6, 2014.

It
was not the quantity of Mr. Snowden’s theft but the quality that was
most telling. Mr. Snowden’s theft put documents at risk that could
reveal the NSA’s Level 3 tool kit—a reference to documents containing
the NSA’s most-important sources and methods. Since the agency was
created in 1952, Russia and other adversary nations had been trying to
penetrate its Level-3 secrets without great success.

Yet it was
precisely these secrets that Mr. Snowden changed jobs to steal. In an
interview in Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post on June 15, 2013, he
said he sought to work on a Booz Allen contract at the CIA, even at a
cut in pay, because it gave him access to secret lists of computers that
the NSA was tapping into around the world.

He evidently succeeded. In a 2014 interview with Vanity Fair, Richard Ledgett,
the NSA executive who headed the damage-assessment team, described one
lengthy document taken by Mr. Snowden that, if it fell into the wrong
hands, would provide a “road map” to what targets abroad the NSA was,
and was not, covering. It contained the requests made by the 17 U.S.
services in the so-called Intelligence Community for NSA interceptions
abroad.

On
June 23, less than two weeks after Mr. Snowden released the video that
helped present his narrative, he left Hong Kong and flew to Moscow,
where he received protection by the Russian government. In much of the
media coverage that followed, the ultimate destination of these stolen
secrets was fogged over—if not totally obscured from the public—by the
unverified claims that Mr. Snowden was spoon feeding to handpicked
journalists.

In his narrative, Mr. Snowden always claims that he
was a conscientious “whistleblower” who turned over all the stolen NSA
material to journalists in Hong Kong. He has insisted he had no
intention of defecting to Russia but was on his way to Latin America
when he was trapped in Russia by the U.S. government in an attempt to
demonize him.

For example, in October 2014, he told the editor of
the Nation, “I’m in exile. My government revoked my passport
intentionally to leave me exiled” and “chose to keep me in Russia.”
According to Mr. Snowden, the U.S. government accomplished this
entrapment by suspending his passport while he was in midair after he
departed Hong Kong on June 23, thus forcing him into the hands of
President Vladimir Putin’s regime.

None of this is true.
The State Department invalidated Mr. Snowden’s passport while he was
still in Hong Kong, not after he left for Moscow on June 23. The “Consul
General-Hong Kong confirmed that Hong Kong authorities were notified
that Mr. Snowden’s passport was revoked June 22,” according to the State
Department’s senior watch officer, as reported by ABC news on June 23,
2013.

Mr. Snowden could not have been unaware of the
government’s pursuit of him, since the criminal complaint against him,
which was filed June 14, had been headline news in Hong Kong. That the
U.S. acted against him while he was still in Hong Kong is of great
importance to the timeline because it points to the direct involvement
of Aeroflot,
an airline which the Russian government effectively controls. Aeroflot
bypassed its normal procedures to allow Mr. Snowden to board the Moscow
flight—even though he had neither a valid passport nor a Russian visa,
as his newly assigned lawyer, Anatoly Kucherena, said at a press conference in Russia on July 12, 2013.

By
falsely claiming his passport was invalidated after the plane departed
Hong Kong—instead of before he left—Mr. Snowden hoped to conceal this
extraordinary waiver. The Russian government further revealed its
helping hand, judging by a report in Russia’s Izvestia newspaper when,
on arrival, Mr. Snowden was taken off the plane by a security team in a
“special operation.”

Nor was it any kind of accident. Vladimir
Putin personally authorized this assistance after Mr. Snowden met with
Russian officials in Hong Kong, as Mr. Putin admitted in a televised
press conference on Sept. 2, 2013.

To provide a smokescreen for
Mr. Snowden’s escape from Hong Kong, WikiLeaks (an organization that the
Obama administration asserted to be a tool of Russian intelligence
after the hacking of Democratic Party leaders’ email in 2016) booked a
dozen or more diversionary flight reservations to other destinations for
Mr. Snowden.

WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange also dispatched Sarah Harrison,
his deputy at WikiLeaks, to fly to Hong Kong to pay Mr. Snowden’s
expenses and escort him to Moscow. In short, Mr. Snowden’s arrival in
Moscow was neither accidental nor the work of the U.S. government.

Mr.
Snowden’s own narrative asserts that he came to Russia not only
empty-handed but without access to any of the stolen material. He wrote
in Vanity Fair in 2014 that he had destroyed all of it before arriving
in Moscow—the very data that he went to such lengths to steal a few
weeks earlier in Hawaii.

As it turns out, this claim is also
untrue. It is belied by two Kremlin insiders who were in a position to
know what Mr. Snowden actually brought with him to Moscow. One of them, Frants Klintsevich,
was the first deputy chairman of the defense and security committee of
the Duma (Russia’s parliament) at the time of Mr. Snowden’s defection.
“Let’s be frank,” Mr. Klintsevich said in a taped interview with NPR in
June 2016, “Mr. Snowden did share intelligence. This is what security
services do.”

The other insider was Anatoly Kucherena, a
well-connected Moscow lawyer and Mr. Putin’s friend. Mr. Kucherena
served as the intermediary between Mr. Snowden and Russian authorities.
On Sept. 23, 2013, Mr. Kucherena gave a long interview to Sophie Shevardnadze, a journalist for Russia Today television.

When
Ms. Shevardnadze directly asked him if Mr. Snowden had given all the
documents he had taken from the NSA to journalists in Hong Kong, Mr.
Kucherena said Mr. Snowden had only given “some” of the NSA’s documents
in his possession to journalists in Hong Kong. “So he [Mr. Snowden] does
have some materials that haven’t been made public yet?” Ms.
Shevardnadze asked. “Certainly,” Mr. Kucherena answered.

This
disclosure filled in a crucial piece of the puzzle. It explained why NSA
documents that Mr. Snowden had copied, but had not given to the
journalists in Hong Kong—such as the embarrassing revelation about the
NSA targeting the cellphone of German Chancellor Angela Merkel—continued to surface after Mr. Snowden arrived in Moscow, along with NSA documents released via WikiLeaks.

As
this was a critical discrepancy in Mr. Snowden’s narrative, I went to
Moscow in October 2015 to see Mr. Kucherena. During our conversation,
Mr. Kucherena confirmed that his interview with Ms. Shevardnadze was
accurate, and that Mr. Snowden had brought secret material with him to
Moscow.

Mr. Snowden’s narrative also includes the assertion that
he was neither debriefed by nor even met with any Russian government
official after he arrived in Moscow. This part of the narrative runs
counter to findings of U.S. intelligence. According to the House
Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence report, Mr. Snowden, since he
arrived in Moscow, “has had, and continues to have, contact with
Russian intelligence services.” This finding is consistent with Russian
debriefing practices, as described by the ex-KGB officers with whom I
spoke in Moscow.

Mr. Snowden also publicly claimed in
Moscow in December 2013 to have secrets in his head, including “access
to every target, every active operation. Full lists of them.” Could Mr.
Snowden’s Russian hosts ignore such an opportunity after Mr. Putin had
authorized his exfiltration to Moscow? Mr. Snowden, with no exit
options, was in the palm of their hands. Under such circumstances, as
Mr. Klintsevich pointed out in his June NPR interview: “If there’s a
possibility to get information, they [the Russian intelligence services]
will get it.”

The transfer of state secrets from Mr. Snowden to
Russia did not occur in a vacuum. The intelligence war did not end with
the termination of the Cold War; it shifted to cyberspace. Even if
Russia could not match the NSA’s state-of-the-art sensors, computers and
productive partnerships with the cipher services of Britain, Israel,
Germany and other allies, it could nullify the U.S. agency’s edge by
obtaining its sources and methods from even a single contractor with
access to Level 3 documents.

Russian intelligence uses a single
umbrella term to cover anyone who delivers it secret intelligence.
Whether a person acted out of idealistic motives, sold information for
money or remained clueless of the role he or she played in the transfer
of secrets—the provider of secret data is considered an “espionage
source.” By any measure, it is a job description that fits Mr. Snowden."

Can we hold judgements lightly and temporarily withhold reactions? What are the options in how we respond?

Below are some excerpts and the link.

"Lady
Gaga once talked about the doubters in an interview: “They would say,
‘This is too racy, too dance-oriented, too underground. It’s not
marketable.’ And I would say, ‘My name is Lady Gaga, I’ve been on the
music scene for years, and I’m telling you, this is what’s next.’ And
look . . . I was right.”

Who does that sound like?

In “The Art of the Deal,” Donald Trump described what he was up to: “I play to people’s fantasies.”

Anti-Trumpers will say: Precisely. We can’t have a performance artist as president of the United States.

That’s irrelevant now.

In
four years it may be possible to say that making a performance artist
president was a mistake. But that will only be true if he fails. If the
Trump method succeeds, even reasonably so, it will be important to
understand his art from the start.

So far, the media and the
comedians are stuck in pre-Trump consciousness. You’d think the
comedians would get it, but getting laughs from left-wing audiences has
taken a toll.

Consider two Trump tweet performances:

Jill Stein commences her preposterous recounts and the press analyzes the threat to the Trump electoral-college victory.

Suddenly,
the president-elect tweets that “millions” voted illegally for Hillary.
The press pivots from Jill Stein to prove, across several days, that
the Trump claim is “bogus.”

Like any smart performance artist, he’s made the strait-laced audience part of his act.

One
day later, @realDonald Trump tweets: “Nobody should be allowed to burn
the American flag - if they do, there must be consequences - perhaps
loss of citizenship or year in jail!”

Now he’s the Queen of
Hearts. Off with their heads! And like terriers chasing another tossed
ball, the media ran down every case on the subject to prove, “court
rulings forbid it.”

That is true. The courts forbid it. But if
it is important to comprehend a president’s mind and intentions, it will
be pointless if the media does nothing more the next four years than
consider its job done if it microscopically fact-checks and flyspecks
everything Donald Trump tweets.

Donald Trump treats the truth as
only one of several props he’s willing to use to achieve an effect.
Truth sits on his workbench alongside hyperbole, sentimentality, bluster
and just kidding. Use as needed.

Another important distinction:
Performers merely entertain. Performance artists challenge, subvert and
alter. They may be slightly crazy, but they’re crazy serious, though
usually a little unclear about where they’re going... (my emphasis)

(as the closing surprising paragraph states)

...Some of America’s most charismatic presidents were also public performance artists who challenged and overturned status quos: Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, John Kennedy, Ronald Reagan. All of them knew that a successful American presidency would be measured by a totality greater than their public performances. "

The following quote is the conclusion of an essay which attempts to tease out the neurological and philosophical differences between empathy and compassion. Exploring this is a support in our ongoing zazen life of Wisdom Compassion.

"Empathy training led to increased activation in the insula and
cingulate cortex, the same parts of the brain that would be active if
you were empathizing with the pain of someone you care about. Compassion
training led to activation in other parts of the brain, such as the
ventral striatum, which is involved in, among other things, reward and
motivation.

These studies also revealed practical differences between empathy
and compassion. Empathy was difficult and unpleasant—it wore people out.
This is consistent with other findings suggesting that vicarious
suffering not only leads to bad decision-making but also causes burnout
and withdrawal. Compassion training, by contrast, led to better feelings
on the part of the meditator and kinder behavior toward others. It has
all the benefits of empathy and few of the costs.

These results connect nicely with the recent conclusions
of Paul Condon and his colleagues, published in the journal
Psychological Science in 2013, who found that being trained in
meditation makes people kinder to others and more willing to help
(compared with a control condition in which people were trained in other
cognitive skills). They argue that meditation “reduces activation of
the brain networks associated with simulating the feelings of people in
distress, in favor of networks associated with feelings of social
affiliation.” Limiting the impact of empathy actually made it easier to
be kind.

I don’t deny the lure of empathy. It is often
irresistible to try to feel the world as others feel it, to vicariously
experience their suffering, to listen to our hearts. It really does seem
like a gift, one that enhances the life of the giver. The
alternative—careful reasoning mixed with a more distant compassion—seems
cold and unfeeling. The main thing to be said in its favor is that it
makes the world a better place."

Paul Bloom is the Brooks and Suzanne Ragen Professor of Psychology at
Yale University. This essay is adapted from his new book, “Against
Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion,” which will be published next
week by Ecco.

The
chain saw, wielded by workers demolishing a row of homes, signaled the
imminent end of thousands of hand-built monastic dwellings here at
Larung Gar, the world’s largest Buddhist institute.

Since
its founding in 1980, Larung Gar has grown into an extraordinary and
surreal sprawl — countless red-painted dwellings surrounding temples,
stupas and large prayer wheels. The homes are spread over the walls of
this remote Tibetan valley like strawberry jam slathered on a scone.

Larung Gar has become one of the most influential institutions in the Tibetan world,
the teachings of its senior monks praised, debated and proselytized
from here to the Himalayas. In recent years, disciples have popularized a
“10 new virtues” movement based on Buddhist beliefs, spreading its
message across the region.

Now
Chinese officials are tightening control over the settlement, in what
many Tibetans and their advocates call a severe blow to Tibetan religious practice.

Wednesday, November 16, 2016

News of victorious battle,
I just shuffle along in the mud,
At this spring temple.

Spring 1944 Senka tada tera no shundei fumu bakari

News of disastrous battle,
I just shuffle along in the mud,
At this spring temple.”

(from Endless Vow, pp.79-80)

One word, a kanji which is a “homonym”, ( i.e. that sounds the same) is changed
between the two haiku, between the two years, between the two sets of events.
With this one so-called changed “fact” between the two haiku, victorious to
disastrous, the two haiku helps us clarify actualizing practice, actualizing
life.

Life events, this ongoing change Buddha nature that we live, can be the occasion
for all sorts of reactions and attachments – and therefore may result in arising
of satisfactions, dissatisfactions and suffering, and arising of all sorts of
entanglements of anger, greed and confusion. Our practice enables and supports
experiencing this arising passing, noticing entanglement, noticing
self-centeredness in various forms, and supports our Bodhisattva effort with
these entanglements self-centeredness.

In the recent elections, your candidates or issues may have “won”, may have
“lost.”

How have you lived winning?
How have you lived losing?

In the midst of winning, in the midst of being defeated, so-called gaining or
losing, victory or disaster, what has been the truth of life - the truth of your
Bodhisattva vows, your Bodhisattva response? How do you nurture this?

We encounter and have relations with many people, some close or far, some
friends and family, some strangers. We hear of changing circumstances, of events
and actions in national politics or the world, even hear of sports results -all
sorts of circumstances where we believe that I, we, they, won or were defeated.
We are certain that we gained or lost, they gained or lost. Please reflect on
where this might have been so for you. And what are the consequences of your
winning, of your losing?

When you gain, what is gained?
When you lose, what is lost?

In daily life, people say or do things, and we believe that this - this
speaking, this intention, this in-attention - means that I, we, won or were
defeated, gained or lost.

Believing this seems natural to us, seems the natural responses of this human
biological social psychological being we are.

In the coming weeks or in the past weeks, some of your “teams” “won” or “lost”,
some of your “causes” won or lost; what do you discover with this? How do
respond?

Family, friends, causes and circumstances, what we want from others, want of our
self – all may result in judgments and evaluations of gaining and losing,
winning and being defeated. Believing and entangling in these, not seeing
clearly what this is, manifests in unsatisfactoriness, suffering and harming.

Do you notice when and what reactive habits are occurring? Do you notice what
you believe and do as a result of these beliefs and attachments? What assists
your noticing, experiencing, responding?

When do you believe you do not have? What is this? When do you believe you have?
What is this?

Loss or defeat can seem emotionally physically painful, and winning or gaining
have other physical emotional aspects. Being this, experiencing this, right here
is this practice life.

When you are feeling
strong, energetic, is this gaining?
When you are feeling tired, worn out or even ill, is this losing?

The Buddha states, “Gain arises for an uninstructed run-of-the-mill person. He
does not reflect, ‘Gain has arisen for me. It is inconstant, stressful, and
subject to change.’ He does not discern it as it has come to be.

Loss arises for an uninstructed run-of-the-mill person. He does not reflect,
‘Loss has arisen for me. It is inconstant, stressful, and subject to change.’ He
does not discern it as it has come to be….

His mind remains consumed with the gain. His mind remains consumed with the
loss…He welcomes the arisen gain and rebels against the arisen loss…As he is
thus engaged in welcoming and rebelling…He is not released, I tell you, from
suffering and stress.

…Now, gain arises for a well-instructed disciple of the noble ones. He reflects,
‘Gain has arisen for me. It is inconstant, stressful, and subject to change.’ He
discerns it as it actually is.

Loss arises for a well-instructed disciple of the noble ones. He reflects, ‘Loss
has arisen for me. It is inconstant, stressful, and subject to change.’ He
discerns it as it actually is….

His mind does not remain consumed with the gain. His mind does not remain
consumed with the loss. He does not welcome the arisen gain, or rebel against
the arisen loss...As he thus abandons welcoming and rebelling…He is released, I
tell you, from suffering and stress.” (Angutarra Nikaya, 8-6)

Please reflect – in winning, in being defeated, in so-called gaining or losing,
- how have your recent responses been the truth of life? What is your
Bodhisattva vow efforts?

Clarifying “forgetting self”, clarifying “emptiness”, what is this moment gain?
Right here, what is emptiness of five conditions? What is this moment loss?

It is important to notice our ways of thinking, speaking, attaching or
believing. Being present, being practice efforts - what do you notice - what is
experiencing, responding?

Each of you have your own life practice, particularly when noticing habits,
attachments, entanglement. It may be experiencing, being just here. It may be
breathing; may be bowing; may be something else – but it is your effort, your
being, your doing - and this ongoing practice enables and supports
clarification, supports skillful and appropriate effort. This ongoing practice
is yours to cultivate.

Hogen of Seiryo (Ch - Fayan of Qingliang) came to the hall before the midday
meal. A monk asked for instruction. Hogen pointed to the bamboo blinds. At this
moment two monks rose and rolled the blinds up. Hogen observed, "One gain, one
loss." (alternate translation, “One has it, one missed.”)

Mumon’s Comment

Now tell me, which one gained and which one lost? If any of you has one eye, he
will see through the failure of Hogen of Seiryo. However, do not inquire in
connection to gain or loss.

Mumon’sVerse

When the blinds are rolled up, the great sky is bright and clear.
The great sky is not yet in accord with our teaching.
It is better to throw sky and everything away.
Then it is so lucid and perfect that not even a wind blows through.”

"The emails currently roiling the US presidential campaign
are part of some unknown digital collection amassed by the troublesome
Anthony Weiner, but if your purpose is to understand the clique of
people who dominate Washington today, the emails that really matter are
the ones being slowly released by WikiLeaks
from the hacked account of Hillary Clinton’s campaign chair John
Podesta. They are last week’s scandal in a year running over with
scandals, but in truth their significance goes far beyond mere scandal:
they are a window into the soul of the Democratic party and into the
dreams and thoughts of the class to whom the party answers....

...Then there is the apparent nepotism, the dozens if not hundreds of
mundane emails in which petitioners for this or that plum Washington job
or high-profile academic appointment politely appeal to Podesta – the
ward-heeler of the meritocratic elite – for a solicitous word whispered
in the ear of a powerful crony.

This genre of Podesta email, in which people try to arrange jobs for
themselves or their kids, points us toward the most fundamental thing we
know about the people at the top of this class: their loyalty to one
another and the way it overrides everything else. Of course Hillary
Clinton staffed her state department with investment bankers and then
did speaking engagements for investment banks as soon as she was done at
the state department. Of course she appears to think
that any kind of bank reform should “come from the industry itself”.
And of course no elite bankers were ever prosecuted by the Obama
administration. Read these emails and you understand, with a start, that
the people at the top tier of American life all know each other. They
are all engaged in promoting one another’s careers, constantly.

Everything blurs into everything else in this world. The state department, the banks, Silicon Valley, the nonprofits, the “Global CEO Advisory Firm” that appears
to have solicited donations for the Clinton Foundation. Executives here
go from foundation to government to thinktank to startup. There are
honors. Venture capital. Foundation grants. Endowed chairs. Advanced
degrees. For them the door revolves. The friends all succeed. They break
every boundary.

But the One Big Boundary remains. Yes, it’s all supposed to be a
meritocracy. But if you aren’t part of this happy, prosperous in-group –
if you don’t have John Podesta’s email address – you’re out."

"On Oct. 24, large companies that hold federal government contracts
were saved from one of the last blasts of the Obama administration’s
regulatory agenda when a Texas judge issued a preliminary injunction
against the implementation of the Fair Pay and Safe Workplaces executive order. The executive order was scheduled to take effect Oct. 25.

The executive order, issued July 31, 2014, and made final with regulations announced in August,
says that if a company or one of its subcontractors has allegations of
violations of federal labor and employment laws, it may lose its federal
contracts or the opportunity to bid on others.

The company can be tarred before allegations are
proved, with no chance to defend itself. It will be pressured to settle
accusations in order to retain the right to have contracts with the
federal government."

"A large construction trade group won an injunction blocking a federal
rule requiring companies seeking federal contracts to disclose past labor-law violations, a blow to the Obama administration in its effort to strengthen workers’ rights to fair pay and job safety.

The
suit against key administration officials, filed in federal court in
Beaumont, Texas, said the rule would shoulder employers with added costs
and other burdens and discourage them from seeking contracts, delaying
the contracting process and damping competition that keeps costs lower
for taxpayers. The trade group in its suit contended the rule will
require contractors to report alleged violations that are still being
contested, violating their due-process rights.

The
regulation, which the Labor Department helped develop, is officially
called the Fair Pay and Safe Workplaces rule, but employers refer to it
as the “blacklisting” rule because they say it will unfairly ban
businesses from bidding for contracts.

The U.S. District Court
for the Eastern District of Texas issued a preliminary injunction late
Monday night (October 24, 2016). In the written decision, U.S. District Judge Marcia Crone
said it is in the public interest for contractors to deliver economical
and efficient services to federal government agencies and this “would
likely be impaired by the arbitrary and unnecessary burdens imposed” by
President Barack Obama’s 2014 executive order that led to the rule and related guidance."

For further elucidation of some of the issues involved, here is a recent editorial regarding this case:

"On Monday federal Judge Marcia Crone of the Eastern District of
Texas granted a preliminary injunction against this blacklist order
because it requires that contractors report “mere allegations of labor
law violations” that can then be used to disqualify them for federal
contracts. This violates contractors’ Fifth Amendment rights by
depriving “their liberty interests in reputation” and constitutes
“irreparable harm.”

Judge
Crone also found that the order’s reporting requirements amount to
compelled speech and thus violate the First Amendment. The forced
disclosure of alleged violations of labor laws may harm their reputation
and create “increased costs, loss of customers, and loss of goodwill,”
the judge said.

The contracting order, which was supposed to take
effect Tuesday, has been a top priority of organized labor. The point
is to provide unions with leverage to extract concessions from
contractors that either aren’t unionized or that are negotiating with
unions over a contract. When a company is pitching for new government
business, a union could use the threat to make labor-law complaints to
force the company to bend to union terms. By the time fact is sorted
from fiction, the company will have lost out to competitors."

At times, it takes forceful actions to make peace possible, rather than the seemingly endless negotiations, pleas and empty threats that have continued in the midst of the slaughter in Syria and the multiple "minor wars" in Eastern Europe.

The following is from an international relations specialist with a "realist" perspective, Robert D. Kaplan:

"There is also a larger foreign-policy question that must be the first
order of business for the new president: How does the U.S. build
leverage on the ground, from the Baltic Sea to the Syrian desert, that
puts America in a position where negotiations with Russia can make a
strategic difference?

For without the proper geopolitical context, the secretary of state is a missionary, not a diplomat. Secretary of State John Kerry
is a man who has a checklist of negotiations he wants to conduct rather
than a checklist of American interests he wants to defend. He doesn’t
seem to realize that interests come before values in foreign policy;
only if the former are understood do the latter have weight.

For
example, just as Western military intervention in Syria risks a Russian
response in Europe, a robust movement of American forces permanently
back to Europe may cause Mr. Putin to be more reasonable in Syria. This
may offer a way out of the sterile Syria debate, in which all the
options—from establishing safe zones to toppling Bashar Assad’s
regime—are problematic and offer no end to the war.

By seriously
pressuring Russia in Eastern and Central Europe, the U.S. can create
conditions for a meaningful negotiation whereby Moscow might have an
incentive to shape the behavior of its Syrian client in a better
direction."

Here are excerpts from a wonderful article of practice encouragement - without using the word practice.

"One Driver Can Prevent a Traffic Jam" by Sue Shellenbarger

"When you’re caught in a traffic jam, you feel powerless. What you
may not know is that you can actually have a big effect on the traffic
around you.

There is a growing body of research finding that an
individual driver, by preventing bottlenecks and maintaining a steady
speed, can sometimes single-handedly ease or break up a traffic jam.

The techniques are simple, though some of them—such as leaving a
large gap between your car and the one in front and freely letting other
drivers cut in—feel counterintuitive to most drivers.

Seattle engineer William Beaty,
a leading proponent of jam-busting techniques for individual drivers,
illustrated some of them on a ride through rush-hour traffic.

...As Mr. Beaty merges onto a crowded stretch
of Seattle’s I-5, he drives at a steady speed, keeping a space of
several car lengths in front of him. “As merging cars come in, I don’t
have to slow down, which means that nobody behind me has to slow down,”
he says. As he nears an exit, two drivers on his left merge smoothly
into the lane in front of him and exit without hitting the brakes.

Meanwhile,
the car behind him is just a few feet away. “That’s the tailgating
philosophy,” he says. “You push ahead, and you think if everybody would
just push ahead, then everyone would go faster,” he says. In fact, “it
just turns the road into a parking lot.”

Disarm Aggressors

Keep a gap open in
front of you so that when a road rager races to fill it, you won’t even
need to tap your brakes. This prevents aggressive lane-changers from
triggering jams.

As Mr. Beaty approaches a left-hand exit into downtown Seattle, the
center lane is backed up as a few cars struggle to cross over to the
exit. “This jam is created by just a few drivers’ getting trapped,” he
says. “This is one of the places where an individual driver can wipe out
a gigantic jam” by allowing cars to accelerate freely into your lane,
he says....

Encourage other
drivers to merge into exit lanes in front of you, so they won’t have to
slow down and block adjacent lanes waiting to merge.

....Mr.
Beaty stresses that his observations about traffic aren’t new. “These
are things that traffic experts and long-haul truckers have known
forever,” he says. Formerly afflicted with road rage himself, he began
experimenting with jam-busting techniques years ago, during his
40-minute commute to his job as an engineer on the support staff at the
University of Washington’s chemistry department. (His traffic research
is unrelated to his day job.) He noticed that traffic congestion forms
in waves, like sand or water, and the smallest obstruction, such as one
driver swerving or slowing briefly, could trigger a chain reaction of
drivers hitting the brakes.

By trying various maneuvers, he found
he could sometimes have the opposite effect, allowing backups to drain
away. “I saw the jams evaporate,” he says.

.....His techniques won’t work if you’re already locked in
bumper-to-bumper traffic and can’t find anywhere to open a gap, Mr.
Beaty says. Also, some congestion is irreducible, when the volume of
traffic exceeds the capacity of the road.

....Experts
agree, however, that lane-weavers—who force others to slam on the
brakes—rubberneckers who pause to gawk at roadside distractions and
tailgaters can single-handedly back up traffic for miles. “These are
some of the really stupid reasons for traffic being bad,” says Steven Shladover, a manager at the Partners for Advanced Transportation Technology program at the University of California, Berkeley.

Driver-education schools try to train students to stop tailgating,
leave wide gaps between cars and take turns when merging, but “people
have to unlearn what they’ve been taught” about standing in line, says Dave Muma,
president of the Driving School Association of the Americas, a trade
group.

“Kids are trained at a very young age that they have to get in
line and not let people cut in front of you”—rules that work well on the
playground but cause gridlock on the highway, says Mr. Muma, owner of a
Holland, Mich., driver-education company.

Mr. Beaty says seeing
oneself as a jam-buster has its own rewards. “You’re above it all,” he
says. “If you maintain big empty spaces, all these options open up, and
you’re actually the superior driver,” free to “be the person who holds
the door open for others.”

It is not often that we can easily see the cause-effect consequences
of our actions, or failure to act, in the world at large. Here are
recent explorations and suggestions about "The Moral Cost of Cats." I will
quote extensively from this article by Rachel E. Gross in
Smithsonian.com about Peter Marra in order to lay out some of his major
points. The article itself also discusses at length his "opponent's"
positions and criticisms.

"(Peter) Marra might like cats. But he also sees a bigger picture. In his day
job, he and his team at the migratory bird center track the global
movements of birds and tease apart threats to their existence. He knows
that birds don’t just twit around pointlessly. They pollinate plants,
spread seeds, control insects and protect environments from the effects
of climate change; they are the glue that binds healthy ecosystems together.
“Birds are critical,” he says. And outdoor cats, he and other
ecologists have determined, are the leading human-influenced cause of
dead birds...

The majority of them (cats) —about two-thirds to three-fourths,
surveys say—are your sweet, harmless, cuddly housecats, which seldom
set foot outside...The other one-quarter to one-third, though, aren’t so
harmless. These
are outdoor pet cats, and they are murderers...sometimes their deadly
instincts spell
trouble for animals and ecosystems we value—and often, Marra argues,
desperately need...The solution for these cats is simple, says Marra: Bring them indoors. The Humane Society of the United States agrees.

So far, so good. Now comes the real problem: unowned cats, which
include strays and ferals. Born in the wild or abandoned, feral cats
spend almost no time with humans; they’re basically wild animals. Stray
cats, by contrast, often have a working relationship with humans. They
might live in managed communities, where a human caretaker regular feeds
and watches over them—“subsidizing” them, in Marra’s words—meaning
their numbers can soar to rates they wouldn’t be able to otherwise.
Whether stray or feral, these cats kill on average three times as many animals as owned cats, according to Marra...

Feral cat advocates say these dense numbers threaten the welfare of
cats themselves, which lead miserable lives colored by fights and
starvation. Ecologists, meanwhile, worry about those cats’ victims—as
well whether the cats might be spreading disease to humans and other
animals.
Management of these overabundant felines is where the two
disagree. For many animal welfare advocates, the solution is TNR, or
Trap-Neuter-Return...

TNR is just what it sounds like: a policy that involves trapping
stray and feral cats, sterilizing them and returning them to the urban
wilds in the hopes that populations will decrease. In the past decade,
TNR has gone mainstream in many cities, helped along by generous funding from pet food companies including Petco and PetSmart. The premise is simple: Cats live out their lives, but don’t reproduce.

Becky Robinson, president of the advocacy group Alley Cat Allies
and a major proponent of TNR, calls the method “effective, humane
control.” “This is a benefit directly to the cats,” she told me over the
phone. (Two communications staffers from Robinson’s organization were
listening in our conversation, to give you an idea of the delicateness
of the topic.)....

The problem is that, for TNR to succeed in large populations, at least 75 percent of
cats in a colony must be sterilized. That rarely happens. The trouble
is that negligent pet owners continue to abandon pet cats, which then
join existing colonies; additionally, non-neutered stray cats can wander
in....

For Marra, TNR is a feel-good solution that is no solution at all—a
Band-Aid that has done little to stem the flow of cats. By refusing to
look at the reality, he says, we are letting our “misplaced compassion”
for cats get the better of our reason. That is why he and some other
ecologists call for a more draconian approach: widespread removal of
feral and stray cats, including euthanasia....

At the heart of this debate is a question not of data, but of
aesthetics, principles and philosophies. That is:

In a world
fundamentally shaped by humans, who is to say whether birds and native
wildlife have any more right to the landscape than domestic cats do?
Should the goal be to rewind the urban landscape back to before the
arrival of Europeans—and is that even possible?

...Cats kill; that much is clear. “The science is all pretty bloody obvious,” as Michael Clinchy, a
Canadian biologist focusing on predator-prey relationships at the
University of Victoria, puts it. But cats also spread disease. Outdoor
cats can transmit plague, rabies, feline leukemia and a mysterious
parasite known as Toxoplasma gondii. The extinction of the Hawaiian crow, or ʻalalā, in 2002 is thought to have been caused in part by the spread of Toxoplasma via feral cats. “The diseases from cats is what’s going to change this whole equation,” Marra says....

Conservation biologists have always called these kinds of shots
themselves. “We’ve made a judgment that biodiversity is good,” says
Temple. For Marra, cats represent yet another destructive
footprint man has made on the landscape. To rid the country of their
presence is therefore to restore some pre-human balance of nature, some
lost sense of grace. It is to protect those creatures that cannot save
themselves. “It is essential,” he says, “that we save these species.”

In his closing chapter, Marra warns that Americans may soon
awaken to dead birds and “muted birdsong, if any at all.” It’s another
nod to Rachel Carson, whose defense of nature helped spark the modern
environmental movement. Today we’ve come to recognize Carson as
an environmental Cassandra; history has vindicated many of her inconvenient truths. But when Silent Spring first came out, her ideas were met with hostility from other scientists, who deemed her hysterical, alarmist and “probably a Communist.”

For Marra, it is clear that outdoor cats represent the Silent Spring of
our time. Not only are cats the single worst threat to birds caused
directly by humans, but they are also the easiest problem to fix, as
compared to many-leveled threats like climate change."

Saturday, September 24, 2016

The following article by Mark Helprin is all of the above and more - and since many of you will not be able to access the full article at the website link below (though if you can and are interested please do) I will quote extensively from the introduction, the body and the conclusions."Even should nuclear brinkmanship not result in Armageddon, it can
lead to abject defeat and a complete reordering of the international
system. The extraordinarily complicated and consequential management of
American nuclear policy rests upon the shoulders of those we elevate to
the highest offices. Unfortunately, President Obama’s transparent
hostility to America’s foundational principles and defensive powers is
coupled with a dim and faddish understanding of nuclear realities. His
successor will be no less ill-equipped.

Hillary Clinton’s robotic compulsion to power renders her immune to either respect for truth or clearheaded consideration of urgent problems. Theodore Roosevelt’s
secretary of state once said that he was “pure act” (meaning action).
Hillary Clinton is “pure lie” (meaning lie), with whatever intellectual
power she possesses hopelessly enslaved to reflexive deviousness.

Donald Trump,
surprised that nuclear weapons are inappropriate to counterinsurgency,
has a long history of irrepressible urges and tropisms. Rather like the
crazy boy-emperors after the fall of the Roman Republic, he may have
problems with impulse control—and an uncontrolled, ill-formed,
perpetually fragmented mind.

None
of these perhaps three worst people in the Western Hemisphere, and few
of their deplorable underlings, are alive to the gravest danger. Which
is neither Islamic State, terrorism, the imprisoned economy, nor even
the erosion of our national character, though all are of crucial
importance.

The gravest danger we face is fast-approaching
nuclear instability. Many believe it is possible safely to arrive at
nuclear zero. It is not. Enough warheads to bring any country to its
knees can fit in a space volumetrically equivalent to a Manhattan studio
apartment. Try to find that in the vastness of Russia, China, or Iran.
Even ICBMs and their transporter-erector-launchers can easily be
concealed in warehouses, tunnels and caves. Nuclear weapons age out,
but, thanks to supercomputing, reliable replacements can be manufactured
with only minor physical testing. Unaccounted fissile material sloshing
around the world can, with admitted difficulty, be fashioned into
weapons. And when rogue states such as North Korea and Iran build their
bombs, our response has been either impotence or a ticket to ride.

Nor
do nuclear reductions lead to increased safety. Quite apart from
encouraging proliferation by enabling every medium power in the world to
aim for nuclear parity with the critically reduced U.S. arsenal,
reductions create instability. The fewer targets, the more possible a
(counter-force) first strike to eliminate an enemy’s retaliatory
capacity. Nuclear stability depends, inter alia, upon deep reserves that
make a successful first strike impossible to assure. The fewer warheads
and the higher the ratio of warheads to delivery vehicles, the more
dangerous and unstable...."

"...In a nuclear world, unsentimental and often counterintuitive analysis is
necessary. As the genie will not be forced back into the lamp, the
heart of the matter is balance and deterrence. But this successful
dynamic of 70 years is about to be destroyed. Those whom the French call
our “responsibles” have addressed the nuclear calculus—in terms of
sufficiency, control regimes, and foreign policy—only toward Russia, as
if China, a nuclear power for decades, did not exist. While it is true
that to begin with its nuclear arsenal was de minimis, in the past 15
years China has increased its land-based ICBMs by more than 300%, its
sea-based by more than 400%. Depending upon the configuration of its
missiles, China can rain up to several hundred warheads upon the U.S.

As we shrink our nuclear forces and fail to introduce new types, China
is doing the opposite, increasing them numerically and forging ahead of
us in various technologies (quantum communications, super computers,
maneuverable hypersonic re-entry vehicles), some of which we have
forsworn, such as road-mobile missiles, which in survivability and range
put to shame our Minuteman IIIs...."

"...Russia has 49 attack submarines, China 65, with which to track and
kill American nuclear missile subs under way. Were either to build or
cheat to 5,000 warheads (the U.S. once had more than 30,000) and
two-thirds reached their targets, four warheads could strike each aim
point, with 2,000 left to hold hostage American cities and industry.
China and Russia are far less dense and developed than the U.S., and it
would take more strikes for us to hold them at risk than vice versa, a
further indictment of reliance upon sufficiency calculations and
symmetrical reductions.

Russia dreams publicly of its former hold
on Eastern Europe and cannot but see opportunity in a disintegrating
European Union and faltering NATO. China annexes the South China Sea and
looks to South Korea, Japan and Australasia as future subordinates.
Given the degradation of U.S. and allied conventional forces previously
able to hold such ambitions in check, critical confrontations are bound
to occur.

When they do occur, and if without American reaction, China or
Russia have continued to augment their strategic forces to the point of
vast superiority where one or both consider a first strike feasible, we
may see nuclear brinkmanship (or worse) in which the United
States—startled from sleep and suddenly disabused of the myth of
sufficiency—might have to capitulate, allowing totalitarian
dictatorships to dominate the world.
Current trajectories point
in exactly this direction, but in regard to such things Donald Trump
hasn’t the foggiest, and, frankly, Hillary Clinton, like the president,
doesn’t give a damn.

The way to avoid such a tragedy is to bring
China into a nuclear control regime or answer its refusal with our own
proportional increases and modernization. And to make sure that both our
nuclear and conventional forces are strong, up-to-date, and survivable
enough to deter the militant ambitions of the two great powers rising
with daring vengeance from what they regard as the shame of their
oppression."

"Mark Helprin, at the Claremont
Institute, is the author of “Winter’s Tale,” “A Soldier of the Great
War” and the forthcoming novel “Paris in the Present Tense.”

From the article, The Gathering Nuclear Storm : Lulled to believe nuclear catastrophe died with the Cold War, America is blind to rising dragons.

Wednesday, September 14, 2016

"If a person criticizes Israel and only Israel on certain issues, but
chooses to ignore similar situations conducted by other countries he is
performing a double standard policy against Israel.[7]
The implementation of a different moral standard for Jews and Israel
compared to the rest of the world, just like the Delegitimization claim,
discriminates against a specific group and is labeled as antisemitism."

By this criteria, the United Nations as a body seems to act antisemitic, as shown in following research findings!

"Our research shows that the U.N. uses an entirely different rhetoric
and set of legal concepts when dealing with Israel compared with
situations of occupation or settlements world-wide. For example, Israel
is referred to as the “Occupying Power” 530 times in General Assembly
resolutions. Yet in seven major instances of past or present prolonged
military occupation—Indonesia in East Timor, Turkey in northern Cyprus,
Russia in areas of Georgia, Morocco in Western Sahara, Vietnam in
Cambodia, Armenia in areas of Azerbaijan, and Russia in Ukraine’s
Crimea—the number is zero. The U.N. has not called any of these
countries an “Occupying Power.” Not even once.

It
gets worse. Since 1967, General Assembly resolutions have referred to
Israeli-held territories as “occupied” 2,342 times, while the
territories mentioned above are referred to as “occupied” a mere 16
times combined. The term appears in 90% of resolutions dealing with
Israel, and only in 14% of the much smaller number of resolutions
dealing with the all the other situations, a difference that vastly
surpasses the threshold of statistical significance. Similarly, Security
Council resolutions refer to the disputed territories in the
Israeli-Arab conflict as “occupied” 31 times, but only a total of five
times in reference to all seven other conflicts combined."

These findings are based on the following comparative study of conflict and subsequent population movements:

"First, the migration of people into occupied territory is a
near-ubiquitous feature of extended belligerent occupations. Second, no
occupying power has ever taken any measures to discourage or prevent
such settlement activity, nor has any occupying power ever expressed
opinio juris suggesting that it is bound to do so. Third, and perhaps
most strikingly, in none of these situations have the international
community or international organizations described the migration of
persons into the occupied territory as a violation of Art. 49(6). Even
in the rare cases in which such policies have met with international
criticism, it has not been in legal terms. This suggests that the level
of direct state involvement in “transfer” required to constitute an Art.
49(6) violation may be significantly greater than previously thought.
Finally, neither international political bodies nor the new governments
of previously occupied territories have ever embraced the removal of
illegally transferred civilian settlers as an appropriate remedy.

The
deeper understanding – based on a systematic survey of all available
state practice – of the prohibition on settlements should inform legal
discussions of the Arab-Israeli- conflict, including potential
investigations into such activity by the International Criminal Court.
More broadly, the new understanding of Art. 49(6) developed here can
also shed significant light on the proper treatment of several ongoing
occupations, from Western Sahara and Northern Cyprus, to the Russian
occupations of Ukraine and Georgia, whose settlement policies this
Article is the first to document."

I have written about how significant I believe the religious rights, liberties and freedoms enshrined in the US Bill of Rights, the Constitution and other documents are to the practice of Buddha Dharma in the USA.

It seems that there are political appointees who wish to limit these religious freedoms in the service of their political agendas. This is also an instance of un-elected/appointed regulators and bureaucrats asserting their power and beliefs rather than protecting the people, the theme of posts regarding "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes - Who guards the people from the "guardian" governmental officials?"

Martin Castro, the Chairman of the United States Commission on Civil Rights appointed by President Obama, speaking for the Democrat majority of this Commission, has written and seems to believe that

"First Amendment Free Exercise Clause rights (are) only for individuals
and religious institutions and only to the extent that they do not
unduly burden civil liberties and civil rights protections against
status-based discrimination"... ( and only) "protect religious beliefs rather than conduct."

His explanation or excuse for limiting religious freedom based on his political beliefs are that “The phrases ‘religious liberty’ and ‘religious freedom’ will stand for
nothing except hypocrisy so long as they remain code words for
discrimination, intolerance, racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia,
Christian supremacy or any form of intolerance.” (I wonder if he wants to simply say those who he finds are part of the population who are "the basket of deplorables"?)

Of course, this proscription is based on his political beliefs and agenda, deciding which religious liberty and religious freedom is acceptable to him. The Bill of Rights is intended to protect against exactly this sort of political governmental intrusion, the political agendas of those in power.

Even regarding antisemitism and anti-Buddhism, which I have personally experienced in many ways in the US, (and which I notice are not included in Mr. Castro's list, maybe because they are not part of the "politically correct") I would not want to limit the religious liberty and freedoms of others, even if they included espousing these views, as long as they do not also espouse violence and worse. (In fact, a number of religious traditions in the US, and political movements/agendas of some Democrats and Republicans, as well as third party groups, do espouse aspects of what seems to me to be antisemitism and anti-Buddhism even now.)

Castro's anti-religious liberty statement and political agenda has aroused articles and editorials. Below are links to a few critical articles:

As "Roger Severino, director of the DeVos Center for Religion and Civil
Society at the conservative Heritage Foundation, a particularly
troubling aspect of the report is what he called “the attempt to
discredit sincere religious believers as being motivated by hate instead
of faith and the implied recommendation that religious groups should
change their beliefs on sexual morality to conform with liberal norms
for the good of the country. I would expect to see such a slanted and
anti-religious report come out of China or France perhaps, but am
disappointed to see it come from the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.”

Another commentator sums up the Commission's report and Castro's statement as,

“Civil rights protections ensuring nondiscrimination, as embodied in
the Constitution, laws, and policies, are of pre-eminent importance in
American jurisprudence.” Translation: Nuisances including the
First Amendment’s “free exercise” of religion guarantee take a back seat
to the rapidly multiplying non-discrimination causes.

He then states, in discussing a dissent to the report by a Commission member,

"In her own submission to the report, the commission’s Gail Heriot
pinpoints the flaw in the finding. A University of San Diego law
professor, Ms. Heriot says she could easily imagine a case for Mr.
Castro’s position. But instead of an argument, she says, the commission
offers a decree.

“By starting with an assertion that
antidiscrimination laws are ‘pre-eminent,’ she writes, “the Commission’s
analysis essentially begins with its conclusion. Why should anyone
accept it? The Commission said so.”

The reasonableness of Ms.
Heriot’s contribution almost makes this awful report worth its price.
Here is a civil rights commissioner who takes the clash between
nondiscrimination and religion seriously, who appreciates that these
clashes are the result of government going places it never went
before—and who recognizes that the questions raised are more complicated
than Mr. Castro’s good guys versus bad guys caricature.

Ms. Heriot also recognizes the public-service aspect of
publishing the chairman’s prejudice: Though she first thought of asking
Chairman Castro to remove his statement, she writes, on further
reflection she concluded that it “might be better for Christians, people
of faith generally and advocates of limited government to know and
understand where they stand with him.”

Indeed we are better off.
The solitary virtue of Mr. Castro’s presentation is that he makes not
the least effort to hide the ugly bits. These lead to a nation where the
mediating institutions that stand between the citizen and government
(churches, schools, private associations) are stripped of influence, and
the political system no longer decides divisive issues through its
elected representatives.

In Mr. Castro’s world, those who dissent from the prevailing pieties are deemed unfit for the public square."

“Religious liberty was never intended to give one religion dominion
over other religions, or a veto power over the civil rights and civil
liberties of others,” he said in the 307-page document.

At the heart of the “Peaceful Coexistence” report is a USCCR
assertion that granting religious exemptions to nondiscrimination laws
“significantly infringe” on the civil rights of those claiming civil
rights protections on the basis of “race, color, national origin, sex,
disability status, sexual orientation, and gender identity.”

Among
the document’s recommendations is the assertion that the 1993 federal
Religious Freedom Restoration Act, or RFRA, “protects only religious
practitioners’ First Amendment free exercise rights, and it does not
limit others’ freedom from government-imposed religious limitations
under the Establishment Clause.”

Here is the opening of an interesting essay, upon which which we can reflect and possibly find ramifications for major problems in both our so-called external world and our so-called internal life efforts:

"Invasive species are the
greatest extinction threat to animal populations world-wide—and
scientists are using new tools to combat them.

In July, the New Zealand government announced its intention to eradicate all rats, stoats and possums
from the entire country by 2050 to save native birds such as the kiwi.
It’s an ambitious plan, perhaps impossible to pull off with the methods
available today, but it’s a stark reminder that invasive alien species
today constitute perhaps the greatest extinction threat to animal
populations world-wide.

Birdlife International, a charity that
works to save endangered birds, reckons that of the 140 bird species
confirmed to have gone extinct since 1500, invasive alien species were a
factor in the demise of at least 71—an impact greater than hunting,
logging, agriculture, fire or climate change."

Here are some of the essay's suggestive "solutions":

"The best way to fight invasive aliens is often with other aliens: Go
back to their native country, find an insect or fungus that eats them,
and bring it in to help. Early horror stories when alien predators
introduced to control alien prey turned on native wildlife instead—cane
toads in Australia, stoats in New Zealand—have given way to much more
cautious and careful scientific introductions of highly specific control
organisms. Done right, such biological control is indispensable.

The Centre for Agriculture and Biosciences International
is an international agency that scours the native homes of invasive
alien pests for predators that can control them. It found a rust fungus
that has reduced the infestation of rubbervine weed from Madagascar in
Queensland, Australia—by up to 90% in some areas. The Centre used two
parasitic wasps to control the mango mealybug from Asia, which did huge
damage to mango trees in Benin in Africa.

Vaccines that cause
sterility are another promising weapon. Spreading food coated with such a
vaccine could render a species sterile, causing its numbers to fall.
This approach is working well in the lab with pigs—invasive species in
various places—and may soon help to fight gray squirrels in Britain.

Genomics is the latest weapon. The Aedes mosquito
that spreads dengue and zika in the Americas is an invasive alien, from
Africa. A biotech firm called Oxitec has devised a way of suppressing
its population using mass releases of genetically modified males (males
don’t bite), which father offspring that cannot mature. In trials in
Brazil, this method has achieved more than 90% suppression of numbers."

"Milan Chatterjee is an Indian-American law student and a Hindu. Last year he
was elected president of UCLA’s Graduate Students’ Association. Last
week he announced his resignation from the post and his transfer to New
York University Law School to complete his degree.

In a letter
to UCLA chancellor Gene Block, Chatterjee explained that his decision
was the result of relentless attacks, harassment and bullying he has
suffered at the hands of BDS activists and their enablers in Block’s
administration.

Chatterjee wrote Block: “Your administration has
not only allowed BDS organizations and student activists to freely
engage in intimidation of students who do not support the BDS agenda,
but has decided to affirmatively engage in discriminatory practices of
its own against those same students.

“Whether you choose to
acknowledge it or not, the fact is that the UCLA campus has become a
hostile and unsafe environment for students, Jewish students and
non-Jewish, who choose not to support the BDS movement, let alone
support the State of Israel.”

Chatterjee got on the wrong side
of UCLA’s anti-Semitism enforcers in November 2015 when he adopted a
student government policy of strict neutrality on BDS.

Under his
leadership, the graduate council would neither support nor oppose BDS.
To this end, he allocated funds for a “Diversity Caucus,” with the
stipulation that the caucus remain neutral on BDS.

It was for
his refusal to actively endorse BDS – rather than any action to oppose
BDS – that Chatterjee became a target for the BDS mob. They submitted a
bid to impeach him based on frivolous claims.

To its shame,
rather than stand by Chatterjee, the administration joined the mob.
Chatterjee was censured by the university and subjected to disciplinary
proceedings. UCLA’s administration claimed that he had “violated
university policy” for refusing to fund BDS groups.

Following
Chatterjee’s decision to transfer to NYU, Kenneth Marcus, president of
the Louis Brandeis Center, which supported Chatterjee throughout his
year of anti-Semitic persecution, issued a statement. Marcus noted, “It
is disgraceful that anti-Israel extremists have managed to drive out
this courageous and conscientious student leader for failing to
capitulate to the demands of the anti-Semitic BDS movement. The Milan
Chatterjee affair reflects the insidiousness of the anti-Israel
movement’s new strategy, which is to suppress pro-Israel advocacy and
intimidate not only Jewish pro-Israel students but anyone who remains
neutral.”